Two heartwarming political stories, and another one
I was on a panel at the National Press Club yesterday focused on media and the Middle East. My Intercept colleague Mehdi Hasan was there with me, but in between us was an empty chair occupied by a posterboard photo of the man who was supposed to be our fellow panelist, Jamal Khashoggi. The panel was called: “Free Media & Expression: Suppressed or Triumphant?”
Talking about the geopolitical implications of the murder and dismemberment of the person who had planned to be in the empty chair next to me was...an experience I hope not to repeat. And hopefully the global outpouring of rage at Saudi Arabia for what was done will help make it less likely to happen again. And it may also cost the crown prince his Kingdom.
The Washington Post today published the last column he filed, just before he was murdered.
There’s no effective way to transition from that to the uplifting news, so let’s just do it. And both of these are worth reading in full.
The group Data for Progress identified eight state legislative races that could each decide control of their respective chambers, and created a way to easily donate to each at once. The response has been explosive. And the group didn’t warn any of the candidates of what they had done. Here’s what it’s like to be a struggling state House candidate and all of a sudden start getting thousands of dollars from all over the country, seemingly for no reason.
Their fundraising page is here, and they’re now up to $160,000.
And down in Houston, a candidate they’re calling an “Asian Barack Obama” is running a fascinating and ambitious campaign in Tom Delay’s old district, which is now heavily Asian American. Defying the stereotype of Texas, Sri Kulkarni has run phone banks in 13 languages, just one innovative tactic in one of the most innovative campaigns in the country.
Here’s the opening of that story, by Dave Dayen….
Nathan Truong was teaching in Taiwan the day that Donald Trump was declared the winner of the 2016 presidential election. At 26, he’d grown up in Sugar Land, Texas, long the bastion of notorious Texas political boss Tom DeLay, so he was no stranger to the triumph of reactionary politics. But something about Trump was different and when Truong returned home, he was determined to do something about it.
Truong, 26, managed to link up with the congressional campaign of Sri Preston Kulkarni in Texas’s 22nd District. Truong didn’t recognize the radical nature of what he was about to engage in; he just considered it common sense. “If a block walker looks like the constituent, they’re more willing to listen,” Truong said.
Truong, who is Vietnamese-American, is now part of a sophisticated new experiment to target and turn out historically non-voting Asian-Americans by reaching them precisely where they are.
Kulkarni, a 40-year-old Democrat, is facing incumbent Rep. Pete Olson in November, armed with a multilingual, multigenerational, multicultural battery of dedicated volunteers, in a rapidly changing district that national Democrats had long ignored, but suddenly believe is flippable. On Wednesday, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee broke a long silence and put Kulkarni on their coveted “Red to Blue” list. “Sri has put together a strong, people-powered campaign that makes this race competitive,” said DCCC chair Ben Ray Luján in a statement.
That may be something of an understatement. The campaign has held phone banks in 13 languages, including six major dialects spoken in India and a Nigerian language called Igbo. Organizers have dispatched volunteers to micro-target tiny communities. It has taken a street-by-street approach to outreach that has already paid dividends. When Kulkarni defeated four challengers for the Democratic nomination, his campaign’s internal figures show that they increased the Asian-American percentage of the primary electorate from 6 percent in 2014, the last midterm election, to 28 percent in 2018.
If Kulkarni succeeds, his tactics will become a model for how to target communities that historically don’t vote, primarily because nobody has ever tried to engage them in politics.
Along the way, volunteers have broken out of their clusters and gained a cultural education of their own. “All the people I’ve met I never knew before January,” said Renée Mathew, an empty-nest mother and precinct chair in Sugar Land. “Whatever happens on November 6, we’re going to still be here. We’re all connected in an amazing way.”
Along the way, Kulkarni’s campaign is challenging the popular mythology of Texas. Olson has derided Kulkarni as an “Indo-American who’s a carpetbagger,” but it is Olson who’s the relative newcomer. Kulkarni’s family can trace its lineage back to migrants from the 1600s — and he is descended directly from the founding father of Texas, Sam Houston. Texas: It’s complicated.